Last week, the US supreme court ruled that states may restrict participation in girls’ and women’s sports to “biological females” and exclude transgender athletes from competing. In the past six years, 27 states have enacted such bans; before the court were challenges to West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act and Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.

The majority opinion, penned by justice Brett Kavanaugh, upholds the laws’ legality under Title IX, the federal statute that guarantees women’s equal participation in college sports, and their constitutionality under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. It also vindicates Donald Trump’s February 2025 executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports”. That directive withdraws funding from “educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy”. US policy, the order continues, will “oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth”.

Neither the ruling nor the order has anything to do with privacy, safety, fairness or dignity. In fact, the bans will deprive trans athletes of all of these. The science on which the ruling is based, moreover, lies far from the truth.

A half-century of science has discovered the protean nature of sex, gender, and desire. Along with liberation movements and legislative reform, medical advances – safe contraceptives, effective abortion pills, puberty blockers – have enabled people to live with more freedom and agency in their bodies. Among the biggest beneficiaries are women and trans people.

As religious conservatives see it, if you can’t tell the boys from the girls, nothing else makes sense. To deviate from a narrow, nostalgic, and (in reality) never-fixed norm is to mock God. It’s no wonder they are........

© The Guardian